DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
Sermon Transcript by Rev. Ernest O'Neill
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I think all of us have probably at least heard of Treasure Island. Or we've read it at school and it's the story of one-legged, one-eyed sailors, you remember, and pirates and doubloons and buried treasure and revenue men, and all that kind of thing. It is written by a man called Robert Louis Stevenson. He was a Scotsman who was a very famous author and lived actually most of his life on the island of Samoa in the South Pacific. Probably, if you ever spent a winter in Scotland, you would want to live on the Island of Samoa, too, so that's probably why he went there. One of the other novels he wrote has become a classic in Western Literature. It's a classic because it deals with the basic problem in human nature. It's a problem that is much deeper and much more serious than the problem of guilt. He called the novel "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde."
He starts the story this way: "Well, it was this way. I was coming home from someplace at the end of the world about 3:00 o'clock on a black, winter morning in London. And my way lay through a part of town where there was literally nothing to be seen but lamps, street after street, and all the folks asleep, street after street, all lighted up as if for a procession, all as empty as a church, 'til at last I got into that state of mind when a man listens and listens and begins to long for the site of a policeman. All at once I saw two figures, one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk and the other a girl of maybe 8 or 10 who was coming along the opposite street. Well the two ran into one another at the corner and then came the horrible part of the thing. For the man trampled calmly over the child's body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn't like a man; it was like...